Since my last entry in the Ethnography Notes, I have written a few more Reading Summaries, as well as more articles for The Caravel. Now that I think about it, these two types of assignments are essentially the same thing; I have to condense an outside source into both a summary and interpretation, which a third party can understand. The end result is the same, too, with both being posted online. This, of course, influences the way that I write. Starting off with the Reading Summaries, I am covering material with which I assume the reader is already familiar, so I have to make sure my summary is accurate. With articles for The Caravel, I have to make the same assumption that the reader may be aware of the event I am writing about, but also present my writing in an unbiased manner. As a side note, I also have to make the calculation that anything I may write as part of a news article could resurface much later and perhaps be used against me — an unfortunate truth of the internet age, but I don’t believe I have ever taken any drastic editorial actions because of it. What’s interesting, however, is that I have a tendency to over summarize these writings to the point where, if I had my way, I could probably happily send in a work that is less than 200 words. This goes for most things I write; unless it is on a topic I am very interested in, I often struggle to find enough things to write about to pass the expected word count.
